Hi, On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 04:39:00PM -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> Programmers are (generally speaking) both lazy and stupid. If a > programmer can rely on robust behavior in the local case, and also gets > it 99%+ of the time in the network case, they will write programs that > assume that this behavior is universally true, and these programs will > fail when the bad thing actually happens. Such conditions are extremely > hard to test, and they really do happen in the real world, because a > 0.02% likely event happens quite often when measured over 100,000 > machines across the world. > > Empirical evidence for my statement: run grep on any large body of > source code. Measure the percentage of calls to read() where the error > result is actually checked. How many programs recover from bad disk > blocks? Hell, how many Linux *FS implmentations* check for them? And yet, how often does that actually cause serious trouble in practice? I'm not sure being 100% correct is always worth the effort :-( -antrik- _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
